RyanAir sues Expedia for online fare scraping

By Amy Bryant

Ryanair claims Expedia are profiting from illegally scraping the airline’s site for flights and fares.

An online fare battle that erupted earlier this year between Irish budget airline, Ryanair, and online travel booking site Expedia is now taking centre stage in a Washington federal court.

Ryanair is suing Expedia for scraping flight information without authorisation and making some sneaky profits from some sales of Ryanair flights through the Expedia site.

A letter shown in court, written by a Ryanair lawyer to Expedia legal department in September, read, “It is inconceivable to think that Expedia believes it has authorisation to access Ryanair’s website or the website’s content, but in case this is somehow unclear: Ryanair explicitly and unequivocally states that Expedia has no authorisation to access Ryanair’s website or its content for any reason.”

“To the extent Expedia ever believed it had authorisation to access Ryanair’s website, Ryanair explicitly revokes such authorisation.”

The lawsuit alleges that Expedia “occasionally also misrepresents the price of a Ryanair flight,” and that the automated queries on the site “have the ability to overwhelm the systems of the Ryanair Website, which impairs the Ryanair Website’s availability and/or usability for the intended users.”

The suit brings to light the tensions that arise between direct bookings through airline and hotel sits, and third-party booking sites like Expedia.

This isn’t the first time Expedia has been in hot waters. Last year, the company was sued by a Californian hotel operator for advertising properties on social media that were not actually available for booking on the site.

Expedia were also in a legal battle with Ryanair back in 2008, with disputes over hotel search and booking relationships.

Ryanair have also had history of dispute with online booking sites like Momondo, who they accused had breached a licence agreement by illegally selling low Ryanair fares through unauthorised links to “screenscraper” websites.

They’ve also filed law suites against Google and ‘eDreams’ for directing consumers for Ryanair flights to their website without authorisation, and as well as having ongoing disputes with Lasminute.com and On the Beach travel sites.

Advertise with us

Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

expedia ryanair